dubdobdee ([info]dubdobdee) wrote,
@ 2009-06-25 12:06:00
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rip swellsy :(
he died on tuesday, of lymphatic cancer, in philadelphia -- same age as me

we agreed about almost nothing but he was always enormously entertaining to be around -- an absurd force of nature

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[info]katstevens
2009-06-25 11:20 am UTC (link)
I was just about to post about this.

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[info]dubdobdee
2009-06-25 11:30 am UTC (link)
nice photo -- were his eyes really turquoise?

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[info]martinskidmore
2009-06-25 11:27 am UTC (link)
I'm really sorry to hear this. I was a big fan of his writing, whether I agreed or not, and I mostly didn't.

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[info]dubdobdee
2009-06-25 02:22 pm UTC (link)
"On the day of the Poll Tax Riots in Trafalgar Square he was boating in the Serpentine wondering what the smoke in the distance was."

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[info]robincarmody
2009-06-25 09:10 pm UTC (link)
I had more than a few problems with his writing, as many will know - in particular, I often thought his championing of pop culture *as a matter of unswerving moral principle in all cases* played (unintentionally) into Murdoch's hands and made him vulnerable, now more so than ever, to those he undoubtedly despised - but ... really, that's no age. Even though I disagreed with him on most things, there was always something comforting (a concept he would no doubt have loathed, but we are all perverse) about knowing he was there, very much like Mark E. Smith in some ways.

And he *did* understand that the media controllers - those in charge of the mass culture industry, as opposed to those who create the best of it - were/are no friends of the left; when I started buying old NMEs, I noticed that he wrote in a much more thoughtful and multi-layered manner about these things (I'm thinking particularly here of his July '86 piece interviewing the Rev Peter Mullen) than I'd been used to in my own adolescence. I think I might have liked his writing more had the NME remained as it was in his early days there (c. 1983-86) because in those circumstances I think he would have been encouraged to write more seriously about the culture industry and its politics, etc., rather than play to the gallery (a left-wing version of tabloid sensationalism) as the increasingly tabloidised NME seemed to want him to do more of in later years - I always felt he was capable of better than the role Steve Sutherland et al had him playing.

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[info]xyzzzz__
2009-06-26 08:45 pm UTC (link)
rip.

I think he taught me quite a lot.

Funnily enough last Sunday I found a box of about 40-50 issues of the NME that I thought were long gone! I guess I'll spend some of the time this weekend sorting through and looking for some of his writing. Especially this one piece I hope to quote a few bits on sukrat as a tribute.

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